we just ain't that smart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 6^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Acts 2:14a, 22-32

Psalm 16

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 20:19-31

 

 

So what is this resurrection thing? One certain answer is that I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Actually nor was anyone. Matthew suggests a couple of soldiers were hanging around, but they were asleep. I even suggest it was lucky for them that they were. This moment in cosmic history was too big for human vision. Or human understanding.

Perhaps since I’m doing a lot of work on the thought of Bishop Allen Johnston at the moment I may be permitted to quote him?

There are many divergencies between the gospel narratives of the Resurrection but there is one point on which they are without doubt: the strongly attested fact that the grave of Jesus was empty. It is absurd to suggest that this in itself proves the Resurrection. It does, however, emphasize the identity between the risen Lord, who is the object of faith, and Jesus of Nazareth. Had it not been for this identification, what justification would there have been for the writing of the gospels?

Strangely Jesus was not immediately recognisable, but the gospel is emphatic that the person a handful of women, and later a handful of men, met on the first day of the new creation was absolutely the Carpenter of Nazareth, absolutely tangible (though he asks Mary not cling to him), absolutely an event in human and cosmic history.

I think their point is that we just won’t ever get it, intellectually. Human beings on the scale of things aren’t that smart. Our absolutely desevration of the garden God has given us to live in is a reminder of that. Our greed, our disinterest, and a myriad other faults serve to remind us that we just aren’t that smart. Certainly when lined up against the smarts of the author of a rather big universe. Or universes.

So in the end the gospel writers – and they are all we have because the soldiers were snoozing – give us the language of the heart. Language of the heart that those first rather clutzy and very frightened witnesses were prepared to go on and die for. Language of the heart that transformed and transforms human lives. The followers of Jesus went on to tell a new story. I quote Johnston again:

They affirmed that death had been conquered; that by a tremendous manifestation of his power God had raised Jesus out of the home of departed spirits. They did not imagine that Jesus, like a ghost, had returned to spend some further period on earth. They affirmed that death hath no more dominion over him, that the universe had become a new place, that the new world order was already here, because Jesus had risen from the dead.

And I’m not going to explain that. On good days, though, I let myself be seized by it. And I’m hoping you do. Perhaps most often I am seized by it, in the days when I am in pastoral rather than educational ministry (but should we split the two?) when I stand at a graveside and whisper, stutter, proclaim those same worlds of hope we just heard read, from Peter’s epistle, stuttering to those who gather and to the unseen departed the words of faith,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

I don’t what it all means. I know that it gives a hope that is far more than pie in the sky, because it is a hope by which shattered lives are healed, strength to carry on dispensed, energy to proclaim often risky justice, reconciliation, love birthed.

I hope in the past two years I’ve been able to share hints of that energy. I’ve not been your vicar, but hopefully I’ve been a fellow-traveller and hopefully I’ve been able to be a bearer of light. There’s no magic wand for tomorrow: there never was. The world is changing, the church is changing, but the hope that transformed our handful of frightened followers of Jesus is not changing. The strength for the future is God’s, not mine, not even yours. I can’t lead you into the tomorrow of this faith community but I firmly believe there is one. And I believe whatever happens to this place, this organization, even to us, that future is bright with the light of the risen Christ, who in all the uncertainty neither leaves nor forsakes us.